Using WP_Query within Plugin - wordpress

Question

Im currently trying to adjust a Content SlideShow Plugin for Wordpress in order to make it compatible with WPML (Multilingual-Plugin). To achieve this, I simply need to fetch the posts from a specific category, put them into an array and return that array. WP_Query gives me a hard time doing this, as it seems like it's fetching the latest post infinite times in the loop. I'm not experienced in writing Wordpress Plugins, so I would be thankful for any hint you can give me.
This is the code of the plugins class method I'm trying to adjust.
function get_valid_posts(){
$validPosts = array();
$this_post = array();
$id_pot = array();
$my_query = new WP_Query('cat=15&showposts=10');
if($my_query->have_posts()) {
while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$post = $my_query->post;
if(!in_array($post->ID, $id_pot)){
$this_post['id'] = $post->ID;
$this_post['post_content'] = $post->post_content;
$this_post['post_title'] = $post->post_title;
$this_post['guid'] = $post->guid;
array_push($id_pot, $post->ID);
array_push($validPosts, $this_post);
}
endwhile;
}
return $validPosts;
}
Note that I've added the $id_pot array in order to filter duplicate entries, but this shouldn't be necessary if the query / loop would work.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I've managed to solve the problem:
function get_valid_posts(){
$validPosts = array();
$this_post = array();
$id_pot = array();
$i = 0;
$my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=gallery-post&showposts=10');
if($my_query->have_posts()) {
while($i < $my_query->post_count) :
$post = $my_query->posts;
if(!in_array($post[$i]->ID, $id_pot)){
$this_post['id'] = $post[$i]->ID;
$this_post['post_content'] = $post[$i]->post_content;
$this_post['post_title'] = $post[$i]->post_title;
$this_post['guid'] = $post[$i]->guid;
$id_pot[] = $post[$i]->ID;
array_push($validPosts, $this_post);
}
$post = '';
$i++;
endwhile;
}
return $validPosts;
}
$my_query->post returns the data of a specific post. Instead I had to use $my_query->post*s* to get an array with all the posts fetched as an object.

Answer 2

You are missing a call to the function the_post();:
while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$my_query->the_post();
$post = $my_query->post;
// ...
endwhile;
See The WordPress Loop